On Thursday, OnLive – Perlman's latest entrepreneurial venture – unveiled an Android incarnation of its eponymous OnLive Desktop – a mobile app that lets users access a virtual Windows desktop housed on servers in the cloud. In other words, you can access Microsoft Office and other staple Windows applications from your tablet – even though they can't actually be loaded on your tablet.

San Francisco-based OnLive began life as an outfit that streamed games onto PCs and other devices, and it's now using the same cloud infrastructure to stream Windows desktops as well. The service debuted on Apple's iPad in mid-January. Earlier this month, the company beefed up its virtual Windows desktop with a web browser that handles sites coded with Adobe Flash, a technology famously banned from the iPad.

Flash can run locally on Android tablets. But Windows can't. OnLive pitches its service as a way for businesses to get their standard Windows apps onto the new-age mobile devices that their employees are bringing into the workplace without the explicit approval of IT departments. OnLive offers a free version of the service, but there's also an beefier version priced at $4.99 a month.

The free version offers Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as well as Adobe Reader for browsing PDF files, and it includes 2GB of online storage. The $4.99-a-month Plus version adds the OnLive web browser, and Onlive will soon offer a $9.99-a-month Pro version that affords 50GB of storage.

The company says the service will soon arrive on smartphones, PCs, Macs, monitors, and even TVs. Perlman has history with online television. His WebTV outfit was bought by Microsoft in the late 90s, and it survives today as MSN TV.